The Donut Doughdown

A “doughdown” is a showdown, head-to-head, but with alliteration. It’s a good way to occupy oneself on a Saturday morning and a better way to cripple any activity planned for the afternoon.

I first rode my bike to Dunaway Books on South Grand Boulevard, the only great used bookshop I’ve found in St. Louis (so far!). I almost bought the largest unabridged dictionary I had ever seen, but couldn’t justify transporting its immense weight, what with the existence of the Internet, which isn’t as charming on my coffee table.

I rode from there to an antique furniture store, bought nothing and continued hampering traffic down Chippewa Street. Just past the Bancroft Avenue intersection stands the Donut Drive-In. The named confused me at first because it got me thinking drive-thru, but it might as well be called “Donut Park and Get Out of Your Car.”

I leaned my bike against a window without locking it so that I could run outside just in time to see it peddled away.

“Do you have a signature donut?” I asked.

“No,” the woman said.

“I’ll take a glazed.”

In a head-to-head doughdown, it’s better to eliminate complicating variables like sprinkles and custard. That doesn’t mean it was easy to pass up the seasonal varieties at their peak.

Like its unrevealed competitor, Donut Drive-In offers no seating and does its donut making where anyone can see. A single donut costs fifty-nine cents. I took mine outside and sat on the sidewalk.

Before the first bite, I was experiencing buyer’s remorse. Who orders glazed? I wanted a Long John with orange frosting, but I ate my donut anyway, and it was really good. Very moist, glazey.

I mounted my bike, put on my dumb helmet and rode up Kingshighway Boulevard to Vandeventer Avenue, where I met the challenger.

Or maybe World’s Fair Donuts is the incumbent. The shop opened in the seventies, but its name, employees and indiscernible pun seem like allusions to an age long passed.

World’s Fair has a superior atmosphere, with less boxes threatening to topple on its customers. It also opens at four o’clock in the morning, which probably solidifies its credibility with patrons of the Casino Queen, “Home of the Loosest Slots.”

Again, I took my donut to the parking lot. A World’s Fair glazed donut costs seven cents less, but it’s a good inch smaller in diameter than its Drive-In counterpart and has a bigger hole. I tried to suppress my American lust for quantity and conduct my assessment on the basis of texture, flavor and density.

The World’s Fair donut pretty much lost in every category. It was sweeter and firmer and emptier, but still a good donut. What a great breakfast.

The real doughdown took place on the 1.6 mile ride home as the glaze seemed to harden in my bloodstream.

If others would like to share their own doughdown experiences, we at Middled would to love to share in them. Thank you.

The Remedy

What is The Remedy?

A hip-hop radio program broadcast on community-sponsored KDHX St. Louis FM 88.1 every Monday night from eight to ten o’clock, co-created by DJ G.Wiz and DJ Needles, collaboratively hosted by D Hoya, Wallstreet, Tiffany and Honiee.

Who is The Remedy for?

“The people that can’t afford to go to the hospital to get fixed,” G.Wiz said. “So we’re like that midwife.”

So, what is The Remedy?

“The Solution,” he said. “If you’re sick and tired of hearing what you hear on the regular stations or anywhere else and you just want to be healed, then we have the remedy. It’s that medicine, that miracle drug, which is the music that we play.”

“The music is the drug, but it’s a positive drug. It ain’t crack.”

I arranged to meet G.Wiz an hour before the show at the KDHX station on Magnolia Avenue. I arrived first and waited in the storefront lobby, organizing a sheet of questions while listening to the rain and the voice of Amy Goodman wrapping up Democracy Now! G.Wiz came in laughing with four or five records and a laptop under his arm. We went into Studio A, the smaller of two studios, equipped with a program computer, four microphones and a set of turntables

I wasn’t a radio listener until I moved to Oakland, California out of college and encountered KPFA 94.1, the first listener-supported station in the United States that is part of the larger Pacifica Radio network. Their programming comes from a progressive perspective and, in the words of their mission statement, seeks to promote “pluralistic community expression.” I found some of the programs unappealing, but Democracy Now! gutted my ignorance of global issues and events and Hard Knock Radio, hosted by Davey D, taught me a lot about hip-hop.

I’m still not particularly well-educated on the subject, but I like some of the music and the cultural movement it represents. My listening preferences gravitate toward a genre of hip-hop that has been classified, accurately or not, as “conscious.” That has led me to artists such as Dead Prez and The Coup who spit lines like, “The cops stop you just because you black / that’s war,” and “Raise your hands in the air like you’re born again / but make a fist for the struggle we was born to win.”

Clearly, I’m not the “you” and I’m not inclined to execute the Black Panthers’ signature gesture. I’m also not the only young white male who can recite all of the lyrics to certain songs, but stops short at “nigger” unless I’m comfortably isolated in my car, doing seventy down the highway.

A week ago, I didn’t know the name of one St. Louis hip-hop artist outside of Nelly and his crew, the St. Lunatics, and wouldn’t have expected to encounter anything worthwhile on that long, barren radio dial. When I randomly tuned in to The Remedy a month ago, it sounded like hope.

“The Remedy, to me,” D Hoya said, “is basically just refreshing. You know what I’m saying? It’s somethin’ that I needed. A weekly dose of hip-hop and it’s injected. Because you go throughout that week, man, and whatever life you lead, whatever it is…hip-hop just puts me in a place of calm peace.”

G.Wiz is forty-seven years old and has a full-time construction job. Needles is thirty-one and supports himself as a DJ. It would be impossible to summarize either of their music catalogues, but a few artists played on the October 15th show included MC Lyte, Diamond D, The Pharcyde, Grand Puba, Dudley Perkins, LL Cool J and J Dilla.

As a self-described “Old School” DJ, G.Wiz says his music spans an era from the birth of hip-hop to 1998. His selections overlap with those of his counterpart, starting somewhere in the late eighties, but Needles is also charged with providing hip-hop in its current forms.

“That way we got the whole spectrum,” G.Wiz said.

Neither the DJs nor the hosts are paid for the time and effort they put into the show, so I asked G.Wiz what makes it worthwhile.

“The enjoyment of playing stuff for people that I think would get a kick out of it,” he said. “When people call and request something, then you know they’re listening. Just the fact to be back on the air doing something you love to do and nobody tells you how to do it. The freedom part.”

G.Wiz has been spinning records since 1978 when he started carrying crates and amplifiers for Sylvester the Cat, currently a radio personality on Majic 104.9 and mayor of Pine Lawn, Missouri. Wiz grew up in St. Louis city, with his family living on six different streets that he could remember to name.

“Your moms and pops be like, ‘We movin’,” he said. “‘Aww, man!’ Just when you get new friends.”

“Kids was out of grownups business those days.”

Wiz acknowledged that “those days” signified his age, but embraces his station in life with the self-assigned moniker—the “godpops” of hip-hop.

“I’m happy to be able to reach this particular age,” he said, “first, being a black man, you know. Some people, people my age more so, used to say ten years ago, ‘You still listen to rap? You still play rap music?’”

“I’m like, ‘Yeah. Why?’”

“And then I play some stuff for ‘em, to change their opinion because they would come up with this information that all rap is crap and it’s gangster rap, talking this and this and that. And then I throw on some stuff, certain songs for ‘em, just to jog they whole mindset. Whether it’s some Common or some Public Enemy, some Poor Righteous Teachers or something, and they’d be like, ‘Oh, I never heard that before.’”

“Of course not. Because you listen to commercial radio.”

G.Wiz does a mix for Sylvester the Cat’s Saturday show on Majic 104.9, but the majority of his radio work has been for KDHX. In 1987, Russell Giraud and John Teller introduced St. Louis’ first hip-hop program called African Alert that was broadcast on 88.1. A year later, G.Wiz created his own record label, putting out albums by local artists, and was asked by Giraud to do mixes for the show.

Wiz later took over the program, renaming it Street Vibes, and continued broadcasting for ten more years. In 1998, he passed the show to DJ Alejan and Fly D-Ex, who moved to a live venue at Blueberry Hill. G.Wiz retired “at the time when the radio and music industry was bombarded by Master P,” and he remained off the air, living and deejaying in Tulsa, Oklahoma until he returned, met Needles and established The Remedy in October of last year.

At a quarter to eight, Needles and the other hosts plus St. Louis MC, Nato Caliph, and DJ Crucial, who would appear on the show to promote Nato’s new album, Cipher Inside, piled into the studio. DJ Alejan was also in attendance as a guest interviewer, bringing the total number of participants to nine, not including me. The energy was high as Needles and Honiee discussed Janet Jackson’s new film, Why Did I Get Married?, but no one appeared nervous or particularly occupied with the business of the show, except for Wiz who was organizing his set.

The Remedy is unscripted and G.Wiz often announces his Old School interview guests, people like DJ Red Alert, Grandmaster Kaz and female MC, Sha Rock of Funky Four Plus One, to the rest of the crew a few minutes before the show or even on the air. This spontaneity makes the program very funny at times and often enables listeners to influence its direction and focus.

“The Remedy is everything,” Wiz said. “The Remedy is whichever way we feel when we come in here.”

“[The program] gives [our listeners] a chance to have something for themselves,” D Hoya said, “where you can actually request a song. There’s interaction. I think people can connect with us because…it’s just a friendly show.”

(DJ Needles)

“Literally, the other stations are almost cookie cutter,” Wallstreet said. “Like I can tell you what time something’s gonna come on, on what day.”

“I really hate when you listening to one station,” D Hoya said, “‘Aw, I don’t want to hear that,’ then you turn to the next station—same song is on that station and I’m like, ‘Aw, shit, I’m trapped! Where do I go?’ 102.5—Let me go easy listening.”

Although there are several radio stations in St. Louis that play hip-hop music, the contributors to The Remedy are reasserting their definition of that broad genre.

“Hip-hop was the younger people’s soul music,” G.Wiz said. “In all actuality, singing is rhyming too. Every other line is rhymes, they just singing. But hip-hop was using breaks from James Brown, Parliament-Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone, you know, and it’s like, that’s the music we grew up on.”

“As far as the people that’s doing it on a major level,” Needles said, “they’re doing what they believe is hip-hop. I can’t really knock one man’s perception or interpretation, but I can’t really honor a lot of that stuff because I don’t agree.”

“I kinda came to the realization that for one group of people to dictate what is and what’s not hip-hop, it’s sort of like how a lot of people in the conservative and Republican party dictate to everybody what is and what’s not American.”

“To me it’s more of a movement,” he said. “It’s a culture that you live and hip-hop gets mixed up with a lot of things that come out of what’s considered a very negative, quote unquote ghetto experience, and that’s pretty separate from hip-hop.”

“Hip-hop came from the ghetto, but it’s not a thing to glorify what keeps people down in the ghetto and that’s what a lot of people associate it with. Hip-hop is about the four elements that make it up. And people who understand it, they know what I’m talking about. And those are positive things. You know, that’s deejaying, emceeing, graffiti writing and B-boying, break dancing and stuff.”

“So, if you’re not really promoting that, and if you can’t acknowledge that and don’t appreciate that genuinely, I don’t really look at you as hip-hop. If all you can do is promote what’s negative in urban communities and poverty stricken areas, then I can’t say you’re hip-hop. You’re just what you are. I don’t know what you are.”

G.Wiz’s “if I won the lottery” dream is to open a lounge that would play music spanning generations and genres, but he believes it would be a gamble in St. Louis.

“I remember when we was growin’ up,” he said, “you would listen to the black radio stations, you would hear, I mean, from Parliament-Funkadelic to Elton John, ‘Bennie and the Jets.’ Same station, you know. You’d dance off of that in basement parties. I mean, black basement parties. You know, we were teenagers. We didn’t have a boundary line.”

“But then the change came with radio and it started helping separate the people. This is your music. This is their music.”

The music that The Remedy plays reaches a diverse community of listeners. Though the demographics have not been charted, the phone calls indicate the range.

“We know we have people fourteen and black, female,” G.Wiz said, “and on top of that we have a fifty-five year-old white school teacher, female, listening, because she actually called and asked me if I could make her a CD or two of some of the music that we play so that she could let her kids at school listen to it.”

Sitting in the studio for the duration of the two hour program, I was amazed at the conversations taking place when the red light was off. I had prompted some discussion about hip-hop and The Remedy’s mission, but it was clear that debates about the direction of the music and the larger cultural movement are conducted whether the microphones are on or not.

The willingness to engage with one another in an honest, opinionated manner seems to enable the group’s family-like dynamic, an approach to relating that G.Wiz perceives in the larger hip-hop community.

“Cats, female and male,” he said, “will come up to you and embrace you, and you don’t really know who they are, and you embrace them because they embracing you.”

“And it’s like, ‘Man, I grew up listening to you. You saved my life,’ you know, ‘You inspired me to want to DJ,’ or, ‘You inspired me to rap.’ And that’s some family-type stuff.”

“To be still in it and to be embraced by the different generations—that’s lovely.”

After my Monday evening experience, I can only agree with D Hoya's comment that, “Hip-hop is well in St. Louis.”

To listen to The Remedy online, just visit KDHX.org to access streaming audio files. Requests and comments can also be made at the program’s MySpace page. In addition, check out Deep Krate Radio with Fly D-Ex and DJ Iceman on Fridays at 10 PM on 88.1 and get a copy of Nato Caliph’s album at F5 Records.

Men's Bowling

Every Friday afternoon my ninety-four year-old grandfather, John Schwartz, meets some of his friends at Coach Lite Lanes in Rolla, Missouri for three games of bowling. He says by the start of the third game, he’s ready to be home in bed, but the group of four women and sometimes as many men is social and entertaining. When he remembers to bring it, Grandpa wears a yellow thrift store button-down that my sister brought to life with a felt bowling ball and the nickname, “Love Tap,” spelled across his muscled back.

The first time I joined them, Grandpa and I were ten minutes late and the seven other, seventy-plus year-old bowlers were waiting with shoes laced, ready to roll. The group usually gets lunch together at Long John Silver’s or another fast-food establishment before the one o’clock start time, but had eaten at the alley that day because of Jeanne’s doctor’s appointment. Jeanne is ninety-one and bowled with a cotton ball Scotch taped to her arm, but that didn’t stop her from defeating me in the first game by twenty-seven pins.

I asked Ann how lunch was, to which she screwed up her face, indicating sub-gourmet. I was also a bit disoriented by the beverage situation.

“Do you have iced tea?” I asked Harold Fite, the alley manager.

“Maybe,” he said.

He returned with an inch-deep sample of tea in a paper cup.

“See if you can stand it,” he said.

“It tastes like tea,” I said.

“Alright.”

In the men’s restroom, laid at the foot of the urinal, is the most direct and practical bathroom mat I have ever seen.

When I mentioned it to my grandfather he said, “Really? I never noticed it.”

“Really?” I asked.

Coach Lite Lanes, thanks in part (perhaps) to that mat, is a clean facility offering an excellent deal to senior bowlers on Friday afternoons at a dollar twenty-five a game. Unfortunately, last Friday morning Jeanne was taken to the hospital with pneumonia, so most of the group was unable to attend. We heard from Nadine at Church on Sunday that Jeanne was now back home, recovering well.

Despite our concern and intentions to act respectfully, Grandpa, Bob Mottin and I went bowling anyway.

“What do you like about bowling?” I asked them from the back seat of Bob’s Taurus as we drove to Long John.

“Just the company, I guess,” Grandpa said. “There’s also a certain amount of satisfaction in letting loose of that ball if it hits, you know. If it hits. If it doesn’t, you wonder why.”

“We have a lot of fun,” Bob said. “A lot of laughs.”

“Who’s got the best victory dance?” I asked.

“I get a kick out of Nadine,” Grandpa said. “She does a little skip, a little turn on her foot.”

“You know,” Bob said, “for no harder than she throws, she gets more pin action. I can’t believe it.”

Bob started bowling in 1950 when he worked at the Ford Motor Company assembly plant in Hazelwood, Missouri. At that time he participated in an employee league, but Bob hadn’t donned his bowling shoes for thirty years before Bill Knight, the Rolla group’s highest average scorer, invited him along.

“Bill wanted to get me out of the house,” Bob said. “That was two years ago, after [my wife] Rita passed away. He thought I was spending too much time in the house.”

“We bowl in the Tuesday league up there and on Fridays, you know, and it kinda breaks up the week.”

Bob was particularly proud of a fundraiser he had participated in to benefit Miranda Blattel, a nine year-old girl living with Epidermolysis Bullosa, a rare genetic skin disease characterized by extremely fragile skin. The event was held at Coach Lite Lanes in September and Bob was photographed with Miranda by a journalist from the Rolla Daily News as the oldest participant at age eighty-four.

“Boy you want to see something sad,” Bob said. “And that little girl is so nice, you can’t believe it. You can’t even touch her cause she blisters. Her mom’s got to grease her complete body with Vaseline every morning and wrap with gauze. I don’t know how she could be that nice and be in all that pain she’s in.”

“We raised sixty five hundred dollars," he said. "The alley didn’t charge nothing for the bowling and we all paid twenty dollars a piece to be in it. And they had all these hearts that they stuck up all over the hall and they were a dollar apiece.”

“The little girls’ mother is a very good bowler,” Grandpa said.

“She teaches bowling to all the young girls up there,” Bob said. “Boy, you want to see strikes. Criminelly.”

Bob, whose average currently hovers at 109, has also experienced health problems that have challenged his game. On November 11th of last year, he dozed off while watching TV early in the morning and woke up to discover an absence of feeling in his right hand.

“I thought I had sat on it,” Bob said. “So I took my arm and I swung it around and around. It didn’t help at all. So I called Bill and I said, ‘Bill, I think I’m having a light stroke.’ And he said, ‘Bob, take two aspirins and I’ll be over there in five minutes.’”

Bill drove Bob to the hospital, where the medical staff administered an injection that returned the majority of sensation and mobility to Bob’s hand within two hours.

“Bill saved me,” Bob said.

Bob, Bill and my grandfather live in Indian Hills, a private residential community set on a 355 acre man-made lake. Bob designed and built the original teepee that stands just outside of the entrance gate and recently crafted a ship's wheel and anchors to adorn a twelve-foot lighthouse that has, to date, received only one complaint about its powerful spotlight. He became a permanent resident in 1980, the same year that he retired from Ford, where he worked for fifteen years on the assembly line before transferring to the stock department.

“That working on the line is miserable,” Bob said. “When they’re running forty cars an hour, which is usually about the lowest point you go, you’ve got to keep doing the same thing over and over, every minute and a half.”

Bob was much happier driving a tow motor out of the pre-delivery department.

“I had one time, Ryan, I worked eleven and a half hours a day, seven days a week and I worked like that for nine months without a day off.”

“Nobody could learn that job of mine because I had to go all over that plant to get parts. Even to get to the right department was a challenge. They had four repair lines and I’d keep all them going. It kept me busy, but I liked it because I never had no two days alike.”

Bob worked at Ford for thirty-one and a half years, having gotten a job when the factory opened in 1948.

“Were you in the War?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Bob said. “You ain’t gonna believe what I did.”

Bob was a Motor Machinist Second Class in the Navy and served on PT (Patrol Torpedo) boat three fifty in squadron twenty-five, operating in the Pacific. PT boat squadrons were nicknamed “the mosquito fleet” because they were small, fast vessels used to attack larger surface ships. Though they carried torpedoes, mounted machine guns and eventually five-inch rockets, PT boats were built with wooden hulls susceptible to damage.

“That was strictly volunteer,” Bob said. “They couldn’t assign anybody to those boats.”

“Because it was so dangerous?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “They had to all be volunteer. You had three thousand gallons of gasoline on them and if they hit that, you didn’t have to worry about swimming. A Jap twenty-five would go in one side and out the other. It was just so dangerous.”

“One time it took them two months to repair [our boat]. The carpenters, after they got done fixing it, put a nameplate on the front of it—El Patcho.”

Twelve enlisted men and two officers were assigned to each boat, and Bob, in addition to his responsibilities as a machinist, operated the number four torpedo and loaded the forty millimeter guns during air attacks. His squadron started in New Guinea and conducted combat operations throughout the Philippines.

Over hush puppies and fish fillets, Bob described the threat of suicide attacks posed by the Japanese Air Force.

“Well, you just never knew,” he said. “I still couldn’t believe it. Every time I’d keep waiting for them, when they’d actually make a dive, waiting for them to pull up.

“One time we wasn’t far at all from this big ship. It was a cargo ship and it had gasoline and torpedoes and they suicide dived it, and when that thing blew up, there was pieces coming down out of the sky that were the size of a railroad car.”

“We were putting heaters in the boats and everything, getting ready to invade Japan when they dropped that [atomic] bomb.”

“We didn’t know nothing. We couldn’t believe it when we heard it. We were dreading that invasion. We knew what was gonna happen. We didn’t have a chance of getting ashore.”

Bob’s high school girlfriend, Rita, had been waiting two and half years for him. They were married three months after he returned from the War, had two children, Robert and Susan, and were together for fifty-seven and a half years before she died on December 6, 2003.

“Yep, she was a good one,” Bob said.

After bowling, Bob waited in his car while Grandpa and I shopped at the local supermarket. As we left the parking lot, Grandpa and Bob got into a discussion about foreign automobiles.

“They tried twenty months to kill me and couldn’t do it,” Bob said. “The only way I’ll be in a Jap automobile, I’ll be in a pine box going feet first.”

“And, you know, a lot of people don’t figure this out. They’re doing with automobiles what they couldn’t do with the War. Taking over this country. A lot of people think, cause they’re made here in the United States…that ain’t the thing of it. The thing of it is that the main part of the money is going to Japan.

“But a lot of the parts from American cars are being made all over the world,” Grandpa said.

“Well,” Bob said, “that was part of these new contracts, John. With General Motors and all of them.”

“Yea, but it isn’t complete,” Grandpa said.

“Well, they’re trying to,” Bob said.

Bob told us about an acquaintance of his named Bill (not Bill Knight) who asked Bob’s permission to fish off of his dock.

“And he come down to the house and he was in a Nissan,” Bob said. “I asked him, ‘Bill, have you got any other car?’ He says, ‘Yea, I got a Dodge pickup.’ I said, ‘Well, the next time you come down, you drive that pickup, cause I don’t want that Nissan in my driveway.”

“Oh my gosh,” Grandpa said.

“He never came back,” Bob said. “That’s up to him.”

“Does any one you know have a…” I started to ask Bob. “Well, I guess you have a Japanese car, don’t you?” I asked Grandpa.

“Yeah, I do,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “you’re not driving the carpool, I guess.”

“Yeah, I don’t have to drive at all,” Grandpa said. “It works out well.”

The following day, Grandpa and I drove over to Bob’s house in my Volkswagen. Bob had offered to show me a book put together by PT Boats Incorporated that features photographs from the War and yearbook-style biographies of the men who served in those squadrons.

“I think there’s a lot of them gone since this book come out,” he said.

He also showed me a photograph that his daughter had framed alongside a medal she had purchased.

“When that was made,” Bob said. “I was nineteen years old.”

“You’re older than that now, Bob,” Grandpa said.

“Just a little bit, John,” Bob said.

Climbing the stairs to the second floor of Bob’s house, we passed a shelf full of miniature models of Ford automobiles. Halfway up the staircase, Bob had me turn around to look at the model PT boat he had spent four months constructing.

“Boy it took a long time,” he said. “Oh, man. It’s not just a block of wood. I made it like a real one. I put all the ribs in it and planked the outside of it. I made the case and everything. I made everything but the guns and the torpedo racks. I ordered them from a model company.”

“I had a set of plans to make the hull and that, but mostly it’s just what I remembered from being on it so long.”

Bob gave us a tour of the rest of his house, much of which he had worked on himself, including the upstairs fireplace. As we were leaving he showed us another model ship he had built inside of a palm-sized bottle and told us the story of celebrating the end of the War with beer cooled on the ship’s deck with fire extinguishers.

In the entry that Bob contributed to the PT servicemen book, he wrote, “I stayed with the PT 350 right to the end when they stripped her down, ran her up on the beach and set her on fire. This was a sad day because it was like losing one of your shipmates.”

We invited him to Grandpa’s house for a meal, but Bob said, “No, thanks. I’m okay over here.”

Journey to the Arch

When I applied to write a guidebook for St. Louis two months ago, in response to which I’m still awaiting even cursory acknowledgement, I tried to make myself appear interesting by saying I wouldn’t put the city’s six hundred and thirty foot icon, The Arch, on the cover. I didn’t offer anything to stand in its place—a cardinal foraging for winter or a cup of frozen custard, to name the candidates.

As the publisher seems to really be mulling my suggestion over, maybe there is something novel or very dense about trying to separate St. Louis from its singular symbol. I guess I don’t like that many people wouldn’t know or recognize the city without the Arch, but if it were removed, Downtown would look a lot like Cleveland.

Before yesterday, I had probably been inside the Arch twice. I remembered the elevators that simultaneously reference 2001: A Space Odyssey and a coal mine, the underground museum and the small windows at the top, easy to miss on the postcard. I decided to get on my bike and reexperience this black hole of our city’s national identity.

On the way down, where Chouteau Avenue meets South Leonor K. Sullivan Boulevard (that was Missouri’s first woman in Congress), less than two hundred feet from the brown and swift Mississippi, there is a twelve-foot concrete flood wall that runs for more than a mile along the railroad tracks.

The wall opens for gravel drives leading to whatever riverside industrial complexes lie behind it, but the graffiti covering nearly every gray inch picks up again after each of the gaps.

The dedication in the wall’s top corner, where the artwork starts and the admirer can look left under a freight bridge to acknowledge the Arch, states that this project was sanctioned.

Over the Labor Day weekend in 1999, hundreds of graffiti artists, roused by Internet chat, gathered for the first annual Paint Louis festival.

As I’d rather not pay the St. Louis Post-Dispatch $2.95 for access to an article in its archive that should be free, I don’t know how many years the event officially ran. As recently as last year, organizers battled with Mayor Clarence Harmon for approval, in conflict with residents who decried the unauthorized vandalism of previous years.

None of the paint I saw looked fresh, but the wall gave me hope for alternative book covers.

Riding from the wall to the foot of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (that’s the Arch), I passed the Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher riverboats and a “Bike St. Louis” sign that had been hit by a car.

I had to carry my Schwinn up a lot of steps, but this, I felt, benefited my sense of scale.

The Arch is as tall as it is wide. It’s made of rebar and 25,000 tons of concrete, encased in nine hundred tons of stainless steel. The cross-sections of its legs are equilateral triangles that narrow from fifty-four feet at the base to seventeen feet at the top. In one hundred and fifty mile per hour winds, it sways no more than eighteen inches.

Every national monument is probably a target for publicity-seeking stuntmen, if not terrorists, so the National Park Service has blocked the only point of street access with a humvee. Eleven light aircraft have successfully flown under the structure and two men have attempted to scale it by means of suction cup. In 1980, Kenneth Swyers died when he tried to parachute onto the Arch, only to slide down the length of one leg.

I locked my bike to a lamppost and descended an inconspicuous ramp. Unlike my first visit in the eighties, my bag was subjected to a security inspection and I had to pass through a metal detector. While I was waiting, I read a warning sign addressing the types of knives that are not permitted inside the memorial. These included Kershaw knives, switchblades, butterfly knives, double-edged knives and concealed sheathed knives, leaving me to wonder what knives might’ve been left off the list.

I spent eleven dollars on tickets for the “Trip to the Top” and the film, “Monument to the Dream,” which documents the construction of the Arch between 1962 and 1965. I also bought a coffee and some taffy from a shop selling “historically-inspired food” because I’d forgotten to eat lunch.

To kill the forty minutes before the next film screening, I wandered into the Museum of Westward Expansion, a dramatically lit exhibition of artifacts, taxidermy and robots.

I didn’t do much reading because helpful individuals like Indian Agent William Clark and Chief Red Cloud were right there, spilling the history from their mouths.

The only thing I found strange about my visit up to this point was the number of people free to tour the Arch grounds on a Wednesday afternoon. Some even appeared to be foreign tourists, but maybe they had a long layover at the airport.

“Monument to the Dream” was excellent. I learned that Eero Saarinen, a Finnish-American architect, beat out more than a hundred and fifty competitors in 1947 with his design.

“Across time a simple shape has given the great memorials their dignity,” Paul Richards narrates, but points out that nothing about the Arch was simple beyond its shape.

Each of the legs had to be self-supporting, as the connecting bridge wouldn’t be set in place until they were over five hundred feet tall. Both the lifts and men were held by the structure they were building and five hundred tons of pressure were required to jack the legs four feet apart in order, on October 28, 1965, to position the final piece.

The film summarizes eighteen years of planning and effort with, “By strength and skill and valor, they unrolled the unknown before them.”

I left the theater feeling electrified by the will of men, then stood in line for an elevator that had malfunctioned just two months before, leaving people stranded at the top.

I only spent three minutes observing the city through the airplane-like windows, but it’s the best view of St. Louis and the visible poverty on the east side of the river.

I left the memorial site shaky with hunger and rode back to Chouteau Avenue, where a kind of utopia awaited me.

The Eat-Rite Diner at the intersection of South Sixth Street is one of the few remaining links in a larger restaurant chain.

This establishment has been flipping patties and serving breakfast since the 1940’s and is an official Route 66 Roadside Attraction.

I order coleslaw and a cheeseburger and would’ve tried the raisin pie if I hadn’t been staring down a few more miles on the bike.

I love the Arch and I love St. Louis.

Why am I afraid of black people?

Last week I moved into a new apartment in the Shaw Garden District in the City of St. Louis. In my new zip code there are 20,351 residents, fifty-three percent of whom are African-American, reporting a median income of $28,604. These figures are almost eight years old and are certainly shifting as more white people (like me) have been buying and renting homes or apartments in the area in response to rising property values, retail development and the various charms of living in a historic urban district.

My parents’ current home and the one we lived in during my middle and high school years are both located in St. Louis County, in the cities of Des Peres and Kirkwood respectively. The demographic there is, on average, more than twice as wealthy and predominately more freckled and susceptible to sunburn. According to the 2000 census, these communities are over ninety percent white.

When I first considered writing this post, I felt a gripping in my lower abdomen, the way the back of the throat responds to a pungent drink. I was already exhausted by the thought of all the qualifications I would feel obliged to make before letting go of a single unguarded thought or feeling.

One of these modifying statements is that St. Louis is not a black and white city. There are Latinos, Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders, American Indians, Arab-Americans, West Indians and immigrant groups from Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics (notably, over 50,000 Bosnians).

For the past two years, with the exception of situations in which I was required to speak or if someone bothered to take a good look at me, the sense of ethnic anonymity that comes with sharing the majority’s skin color was available to me and often comforting. Over eighty-four percent of St. Petersburg’s population is ethnically Russian. The few black people I saw were almost entirely African university students, who were clearly the objects of curiosity if not hate and violence—the extremes being a young African man paid to wear a white wig and Victorian costume while welcoming visitors into the Museum of Chocolate and the two (at least that I heard of) racially motivated murders that occurred during my stay.

If I, as with the majority of white people, were asked, “Are you racist?” I would respond, “No.” At the same time, three truths seem to complicate this answer: I have never been close friends with a black person. Many of the privileges and opportunities I enjoy in my life are enabled, either in part or directly, by my inclusion in the dominant majority. When I encounter African-Americans in public contexts, usually on the street and particularly with young black males, before I have the chance to consider or correct, my body expresses fear.

Rather than ascribe this feeling to the influence of media or an isolated experience in sixth grade when two black kids extorted my lunch money in the school’s bathroom without even touching me and then offered to return it as I was leaving to which I replied, “That’s cool. You can have it,” I decided to first consult with people either living or working in and around my neighborhood.

The first person I saw was a young black man, probably seventeen years old. He was walking toward me, then turned at the intersection I was approaching. I hesitated, then followed him quickly until I was about ten paces back and said, “Hey man. Excuse me.” I had never approached someone for a man-on-the-street interview, and he looked at me as if I was a lost tourist salesman.

“I’m a writer, but not for a newspaper or magazine. I’m writing an article about racism,” I said, though I’d planned to say “internalized racism.” “Could I ask you a question?”

“Naw,” he said and walked away.

After that, every person or group of people agreed to talk to me and have their statements recorded. Some people provided their full names and humored me by slowly spelling them into my microphone. Others gave me a first name or pseudonym and after three people said they didn’t want their picture taken, I stopped asking. I talked to seventeen people (five white, twelve black) of different ages.

My first conversation was with a white man in his forties named “Red” and Charles Cousins, a black man in his mid-twenties. They work together at hardware store nearby and were waiting for their ride home.

I asked them, as I would with everyone else I talked to, “Do you think white people are generally afraid of black people?”

“Hell yeah they are!” Red said. “If you ain’t raised around black people, you come from a different town or something, hell yeah you’re scared of them black people.”

“There’s black people scared of black peoples,” Cousins added.

“It depends on what you’ve been brung up around,” Red said. “I was raised in North St. Louis. I was raised around black people, went to school with them. I ain’t scared of none of them.”

“It’s definitely taught to you,” Cousins said. “You don’t just wake up one day and you’re that way. Racism is taught to you.”

I asked Cousins, who is a big man, if he’d experienced white people responding to him with fear.

“Once I walked down the street where an older lady was coming this way and as I got closer, she kind of moved over. So I guess she’s got this fixation in her mind that I’m gonna try to take something from her. All black people are not that way, regardless of what you see on the news.”

“She’s probably just scared,” Red said. “She don’t know who to trust. And maybe she is racist, so she don’t trust black people. There’s some people that’s not racist, but they’re just scared of black people. They ain’t hating them, but they’re just scared of them.”

The next people I talked to were eighteen year old African-American identical twins named Randle and Randell. I approached them as I’d approached the first guy, like a store clerk trying to return a forgotten wallet, and they agreed to talk to me, even though I’d managed to stop them in the middle of a drive-thru ATM lane.

“Sometimes I would say [white people] are afraid of black people because of the way they act,” Randle said. “They cross the street or tend to look away from you. I don’t mind it too much. I just look past it and keep going, you know what I’m saying, just move on with myself. I just say forget it, that’s just how they feel.”

“I don’t take it as they’re racist or anything,” Randell said, “but they are somewhat cautious of us. Sometimes I look cautious at people too.”

I then asked Randell where that response on the part of some white people might come from if he doesn’t ascribe it to racism.

“The way black people portray theyselves to be. You know, thugs, gangsters and all that. Doing all that stuff, you know what I’m saying. Being in trouble all the time. I mean us being the majority of people going to prison. Basically it’s black people giving a bad name for ourselves by the way we act.”

To my follow up question, “Do you think black people are accurately portrayed by the media?” Randle responded, “Yeah, we are.”

“It’s up to us to change it,” Randell said. “We’re the people doing it, so we can change it ourselves. We just have to build on that and our self-esteem instead of looking at ourselves and saying, ‘Aw, we ain’t got this and we ain’t got that.’ Well, we go to school, we’ve got schools."

"I mean I’m not one to say. I dropped out, but I go back to GED classes trying to do something with myself. I can get myself out of this situation just like you all can. I know a lot of people who’s in this situation who’s white and they pulling theyself out of it just like I can, living in the same neighborhood I’m in. There’s just more of us in this neighborhood. That’s all that is.”

In the middle of Randell’s comment, two young white men in their twenties pulled up to the drive-thru ATM. The passenger leaned out of his window and asked, “Are you guys selling something?”

“We ain’t even good, though, man,” Randle said.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“That wasn’t nothing,” he said. “Just people passing.”

I walked down Grand Avenue and crossed the Arsenal intersection to a bus stop where several people were waiting. I chose to approach three black men probably in their early to mid-thirties, one of whom was dressed in hospital scrubs. I told them that I was writing about internalized racism and, specifically, how white people respond to black people. Their names were Mr. Stacey Horner, Busy Bee and Antoine Roberts.

“Racism is alive and well,” Busy Bee said. “You know, we don’t have to deal with each other per se, but if we see a person in need—black, white or whatever color you are—we quick to help.”

“But we experience a whole lot of racism,” he said, “just walking down the street, who you are. You black, let’s go the other way. Lock your doors. Everybody ain’t crooks. I get a lot of it. They can pull up right here at the traffic stop. You can hear them doors clickin’. Clack, clack, clack. I know. I experienced it.”

“Even our own kind act funny towards each other,” Roberts said. “So it don’t matter. It all depends on where you’re at, where you go. It’s really how you carry yourself, how you present yourself.”

“I think the only reason you walked up to us is that our clothes ain’t sagging off our ass,” Horner said, “so you didn’t feel afraid. You know what I mean. Because you see a little maturity in all of us, you know. I don’t think you would ask a bunch of twenty year olds what you’re asking us now. I don’t think you would approach three twenty year old black boys, because they scare me and I’m a black man.”

“But we know, from our experience,” Horner said, “that white people teach they kids to hate black people just because we black. That’s some shit ya’ll been doing for years. We can’t fix ya’ll issues. Those are ya’ll issues.”

“You think it’s about parents specifically telling their children black people are bad?” I asked.

“That’s where it all starts,” Horner said. “You take a white baby and a black baby and let they ass go play, I bet you they don’t give a fuck.”

“I’ve got some neighbors,” Busy Bee said, “some Mexicans, whites and I’m black and there’s a black family over there and they’ve got three little girls. They playing with each other, and a little white boy, Mexican boy. Aw, they having a ball. But as they get older, that’s gonna end. I asked my wife, ‘How long you think that will last?’”

I tried to make a distinction between white people who are consciously and willfully racist and those who do not identify themselves as racist.

“Them the ones I’m most afraid of,” Busy Bee said.

“They smile in your face and got a knife at your neck,” Horner said. “That’s the scary thing about you white people. We don’t know how to trust ya’ll. I don’t think all white people are bad. I just hate the ones who’ve been taught that bullshit. It’s not ya’ll young ones’ fault. That’s what ya’ll parents teach you.”

Busy Bee also asserted an inequality of acceptance between the white and black communities in the example of interracial relationships, as well as other boundaries white people maintain in their social interactions.

“All day at work you see me, you know me by name. ‘Hey, how you doing, Byron? How you doing, Sarah?’ Come across outside that job. ‘Hey, how you doing?’ Shit. They don’t know me.”

“I work in a hospital,” Horner said. “I deal with white people every day. And no matter how nice of a demeanor you practice, in my subconscious I know you hate me. Just because I’m black. No matter how good a gold I am. You don’t see me. All you see is my exterior. My interior is beautiful.”

“Our biggest question is, ‘How come when racism pop up, it’s always got to be black people and white people?’ Don’t nobody ever talk about the Chinese. Them foreign motherfuckers they keep letting over here, blowing our shit up. They penalize us for every motherfucking thing in the world. You know what I mean?”

“All we want to do is be economically viable. That’s all we trying to do. A black man want to fucking be able to go the bank and get a loan. Get a house. Fucking live. Like ya’ll.”

“There go my chariot,” he said. “You see a black man catching the damn bus. I’ve been working all my life, can’t even afford a car.”

I understood that my investigation was incomplete. I needed to talk to more white people to find our how they think about and experience manifestations of racism or potentially doubt its significance.

I met Ashley Murphy, a white woman in her early twenties, outside a coffee shop. She allowed me to speak with her as she walked to the local library where she works.

“What are you doing this for?” she asked. “Am I going to come off really bad or something?”

I explained my purpose and described some of the interviews I had already conducted.

To the question about white fear she responded, “I guess it depends on where you go. Generally I don’t think [white people] are afraid of [black people]. Without realizing it, you might like... I think it’s more of like a… I don’t know. That’s hard. I’m sorry.”

“I live around here and I work at the library up there. So I guess it’s like, if you’re not in a place where you have interactions with people, I think you’re more aware that someone is of a different race, so you’re trying to give the appropriate response. I think you notice it more.”

“There’s times when if I’m walking down the street and there’s a big teenage kid and he’s coming down the street, I might go to the other side, but that’s mostly because I’m kind of shy. I do that with other people too, though, so it’s hard for me to think it’s because…”

“So it’s not always dependent upon race,” I said.

“I guess,” she said.

I tried to clarify if she saw a connection between the aversion a white person might demonstrate towards a black person on the street and racism.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess people are kind of suspicious. Maybe if you were in a different neighborhood or maybe like in the Central West End or something, maybe you wouldn’t think about it as much, because you think most of the people around here, whatever race that they are, are probably of a certain type of person and so am I since I’m down here and we’re all in the same neighborhood together."

"But then with a place like this where, I mean, from block to block it’s so different, like the socio-economic lines are so blurred wherever you go, I think you all get thrown into something together and everybody’s kind of different, so you don’t really know if like, ‘Well, is this person just some kid or is he somebody from a few blocks over who’s trying to come over here and maybe see?’ So I think that might be possibly unique to this neighborhood. I don’t know really.”

“I guess people don’t want to be naïve, maybe. If you are kind of like, ‘Oh, maybe this person is gonna have something to say to me or want something from me.’ Regardless of whether they do or not, if you’re uptight, then you don’t even open that window up to have yourself be taken advantage of. Maybe it’s like that. Or if you’re like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ and people are like, ‘Oh yeah, this person is a sucker, or whatever.’”

“Sometimes I’ll be walking and be like, ‘Dude, don’t ask me for change,’ and then that’s not even what they’ll want. They’ll just be like, ‘Do you have a light?’ or something and then I’ll feel like an asshole.”

Further down the street, I met two white men and a white woman, probably in their forties or early fifties, standing outside a pawn shop, looking through the viewfinders of two antique box cameras. At the end of the interview, I would ask them for their names to which one of the men responded, “I’d rather be anonymous,” before providing me with his first name, John. The other two were Chris and Angie.

“Do you think that white people are generally afraid of black people?” I asked.

Five seconds ticked by before John said, “You know, I’d actually say, probably yeah.”

“I’d say, yeah,” Chris said.

“Believe it or not, even in this day and age,” John said. “You wouldn’t think so anymore. We like to think we’re all modern and enlightened, but human nature being what it is, in general, and it’s hard to speak in generalities. There’s always acceptance and, in effect, it may not even be true in the majority, but maybe a significant minority of whites probably consider themselves reticent.”

“I live in Kirkwood,” Chris said, “and I recently bought a flat down here, a couple blocks over. You know there’s blacks in Kirkwood and I got along with them great cause they’re affluent, but I rented to a bunch of blacks and when I bought the building it was all full of blacks. There were four black families in there and these people were desperate. And they were on drugs, they were selling drugs and I was threatened by them, by one of them, anyway. So, yeah, it put fear into me about people that are desperate. I don’t know if they had to be black or not.”

“It’s a combination of economic and race,” he said.

“I lived in other cities with large black populations,” Angie said, “and I definitely get a different impression here.”

“St. Louis is very unique, I feel. I think it’s got a ways to come. I know that a Sixty Minutes-type, investigative show did a piece on racism and it was in St. Louis. I think they sent a white guy in to buy some shoes or something, followed by a black guy and they watched how the merchant treated color, and it was kind of eye opening. And that was St. Louis. My impression of St. Louis is that it’s a little behind.”

In light of Chris’ negative personal experience, I again asked what factors might explain the fear that some whites demonstrate in their public interactions with African-Americans.

“Well, there’s a lot of young male blacks that are in prison because of crime they commit,” Chris said. “I think about black men forming gangs and being in activities where they sell drugs or whatever and claim territory and defend territory to do that and turn to violent activities to make money. I mean rappers sing about it all the time.”

“Do you think that these expressions of fear and apprehension on the part of white people…do you think that white people should be more accountable for that, or should the black community be accountable for that because of these examples?” I asked.

“They should be more conscious of it,” John said.

“Who should?” I asked.

“Everyone, black or white,” he said. “When it happens unconsciously, then I think it’s always more dangerous than if it happens consciously. I think what drives that kind of behavior is just basic fear and fear of the unknown, fear of what’s not known. Often, what’s thought of as not known is actually made worse in the mind of someone who thinks they’re afraid of what it is they don’t know or don’t understand.

“When something like that happens completely unconsciously, then it’s so deeply rooted that it can lead to…I mean, that’s the wellspring of prejudice. That’s the wellspring of behaviors that don’t have any basis in reality any more. And that’s what leads to trouble.”

“I suspect that any human being is susceptible. The key to the whole thing is consciousness. I would say that lack of consciousness about the motives of our behavior is the greatest threat. It’s a greater threat than violence or crime or anything else you could think of.”

On my walk home, I passed a car parked in Tower Grove Park, inside of which Doc Mayberry, a middle-aged black man, was reclined in the driver’s seat. During our conversation, he brought up his experiences growing up in South Mississippi. He was once refused service at the front of an ice cream parlor, but Doc also cited examples of how racism continues today.

“As long as different races exist, people are gonna flock to their own kind,” he said.

“You know I used to raise chickens. Certain kind of chickens, they stuck together. You know what I’m saying. The Domino hens, they stayed together. The red hens stayed together. I never really seen them intermingle like that. The rooster didn’t care of course.”

“But I think that as long as the races exist, until we develop as a human race, develop our mentality to the point where we can accept another person for what he is, how he treats you, rather than the color of the skin…until we do that as a whole, I don’t know how many years it’s gonna take, then we’re going to continue having those kind of incidents [referring to the case of the “Jena Six,” which we had been discussing]. You can believe that.”

Before I left, he cited the “I Have a Dream” speech that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered forty-four years ago: “…a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Obviously the people I spoke to were only representing themselves and their own opinions. I’m grateful that they were willing speak with me.

As I walked the rest of the way home, I passed a black man who was probably about my age (twenty-seven). He was dressed athletically and was wearing glasses. In the mixture of feelings I experienced as our shoulders brushed—apathy, curiosity, self-consciousness—I know there was fear.

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